Mark Somers, Network Rail Project Director, gives a guided tour of the new look station at London Gatwick Airport. It is set to open to passengers on Tuesday 21 November, transforming the journey from train to plane and giving passengers travelling between Brighton and London easier, faster, more reliable journeys. A bigger, better and brighter station with a new second concourse and airport entrance will double the space for the millions of passengers that use the station each year. Eight new escalators and five new lifts will provide a step change for accessibility. The new lifts and escalators, along with four new stairways and widened platforms, will help passengers move between the train station and the airport more quickly and easily. Easier journeys from train to plane will benefit passengers across the wider network, helping keep trains running on time by removing the congestion and queuing on platforms that delay trains.
Passengers travelling on the Brighton Main Line are already seeing the benefits of the project thanks to track upgrades that have helped reduce journey times between Brighton and London to one hour on some services.
The existing station concourse is also bigger and better than ever before with new customer information systems, more ticket gates, a dedicated passenger assistance point enhancing the passenger experience and helping people move through the station more quickly.
Passengers travelling on the Brighton Main Line are already seeing the benefits of the project thanks to track upgrades that have helped reduce journey times between Brighton and London to one hour on some services.
The existing station concourse is also bigger and better than ever before with new customer information systems, more ticket gates, a dedicated passenger assistance point enhancing the passenger experience and helping people move through the station more quickly.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 Just to explain the situation here, we're standing on platform 7, south country end
00:17 of the station, temporary holding in place here across, round to the bottom of the escalators.
00:26 From the night of the 20th into the 21st, all of this will be removed.
00:31 We'll have some security guards here, but basically this will be ready to open and obviously
00:37 leading you into the escalators before we open.
00:41 But all of this will be open and ready to operate, so we've got all of our final lighting,
00:50 customer information, CCTV is all in place.
00:53 Behind you is the waiting shelter which, believe it or not, I think used to be up the other
00:57 end of the platform.
01:00 We've relocated it, brought it back down here, got power to it, we're just waiting for Honeywell
01:06 to come along and sort out the power door on the waiting shelter, in which case that
01:11 will open at the same time.
01:14 This platform originally had quite an extensive holding all the way through here and we've
01:19 opened that up.
01:20 If you come back up onto the platform on the other side, you'll be able to see looking
01:24 across when we go up 5 and 6.
01:27 So we're now making our way up the escalator onto the...
01:31 Yeah, this is the new airport entrance concourse.
01:44 So where we're standing now in the middle of the new concourse, overall space here around
01:50 about 1700 square metres, okay, about the size of 8 tennis courts I think is one of
01:59 the statistics that's been quoted.
02:02 What you can see here is your four high capacity lifts, two on each platform.
02:15 Obviously what you've got here in Gatwick is a lot of people arriving with suitcases
02:21 and this is critical to getting people up quickly off the lifts.
02:25 The last three weeks we've been putting all of the special acoustic truss cladding on
02:33 all the main trusses so that has acoustic properties to give us the best possible performance
02:39 out of the PAVA systems, okay, because we have to meet a certain level of intelligence
02:45 in terms of speech.
02:48 Throughout the whole concourse area you can see there is new customer information systems
02:53 and you'll see live information, they're already connected, they're already commissioned and
02:58 they're all ready to go.
03:00 So that gives passengers arriving here information about boarding trains and obviously you'll
03:08 see a lot of signage as you can see all around you pointing and directing people to the airport
03:12 terminals which is through and I'll take you through that.
03:16 The pauses under the interoperability requirements is the wayfinding and actually what you will
03:25 find in a few discreet places is what we call prismatic signage.
03:35 You've got prismatic signage, that's one of the requirements and throughout the station
03:40 areas we've built for partially sighted people throughout the station areas.
03:46 There are actually inflated pillows up in the main roof right the way across between
03:51 the trusses, both sides, so you're providing natural light, solar gain.
03:58 There is an air pump on the back of the PTI building on the roof and the air pump pumps
04:05 air around all of the pillows and keeps them inflated.
04:09 If you have a look at the Gatwick Airport arrivals road, ETFE pillows are on the existing
04:16 airport structures as well so again architecturally it's sympathetic with the airport and the
04:22 way that the airport architecture has been designed.
04:24 It's great, it's a lot of work here, we've got limited headroom, huge challenges in terms
04:29 of structural solution, the ETFE's a great solution for that.
04:34 The new street was the same thing wasn't it?
04:37 Yes, exactly the same, in fact a very similar specification.
04:40 Otherwise the whole thing would have fallen down because it would be too heavy.
04:43 We had similar things here, glass wasn't an option.
04:44 Revenue protection for the station, so effectively these are the new ticket barriers that are
04:45 going in, they're just being protected at the moment by these coverings.
04:46 They're all installed, they're all commissioned and all ready to go, cubic are back in next
04:47 week.
04:48 Actually one of the pieces of work that we've done here is to migrate all of the cubic control
05:12 for the main gate lines in the existing station concourse over to here where they've got a
05:38 dedicated equipment room for their control system to control the barriers and then you
05:39 have a terminal there which the staff are able to use to operate the barriers remotely.
05:40 So effectively this entrance through here will be for people that are coming into Gatwick,
05:41 and into the short stay car park or to walk off and go wherever.
05:42 It's not seen, the main station entrance is over the other side, but this makes sure that
05:43 we've still got the capability to move people in and out of the station, hence why this
05:44 is called the PTI which is the passenger train interface.
05:45 Okay?
05:46 We need another cycle.
06:14 Come the 21st or the night of the 20th into the 21st this holding will be removed.
06:34 What signage will actually say here is no entrance to airport because you want passengers
06:43 to go either in through the south terminal departures there or up through the travel
06:48 aid to get access to the airport.
06:52 The reason you don't want them coming through here is because they need a ticket, a train
06:57 ticket to a gate line, hence why this is no access to the, but obviously people once they
07:02 get to know it and they realise, you know, if people want to pay 40 quid a day to park
07:07 in a short stay car park and get on a train, that's a facility they've got available to
07:12 them.
07:13 You can see the run screen.
07:14 This is the end of the platform.
07:15 Temporary holdings here will be removed to open up the escalators and stairs.
07:22 These gates will obviously shut across here.
07:27 So this is the emergency exit in case of a fire evacuation from the platform.
07:28 And off the London end of the platform you can see the ramp for people to reduce mobility
07:29 all the way down, all the way down here.
07:30 And then out the emergency exit, you can see the ramp for people to reduce mobility all
07:31 the way down here.
07:32 And then out the emergency exit, you can see the ramp for people to reduce mobility all
07:33 the way down here.
07:34 And then out the emergency exit, you can see the ramp for people to reduce mobility all
07:35 the way down here.
07:36 And then out the emergency exit, you can see the ramp for people to reduce mobility all
07:37 the way down here.
07:38 And then out the emergency exit, you can see the ramp for people to reduce mobility all
07:45 the way down here.
07:46 And then out the emergency exit, you can see the ramp for people to reduce mobility all
07:47 the way down here.
07:48 And then out the emergency exit, you can see the ramp for people to reduce mobility all
07:49 the way down here.
07:50 And then out the emergency exit, you can see the ramp for people to reduce mobility all
07:51 the way down here.
07:52 And then out the emergency exit, you can see the ramp for people to reduce mobility all
07:53 the way down here.
07:54 And then out the emergency exit, you can see the ramp for people to reduce mobility all
07:55 the way down here.
07:56 And then out the emergency exit, you can see the ramp for people to reduce mobility all
07:57 the way down here.
07:58 And then out the emergency exit, you can see the ramp for people to reduce mobility all
07:59 the way down here.
08:00 And just to give you an appreciation, when you look at this structure, and you'll see
08:06 it better from the platform, just how challenging it has been to construct this above a 24/7
08:13 operational railway.
08:15 365 days of the year we've worked here, generally getting around about four hours a night working
08:23 with a fast line possession and maximizing the use.
08:27 And obviously you can't work on any of these parts of these elements of the structure when
08:32 you've got an open railway.
08:33 So that has been a massive challenge for us.
08:36 You can't work on the roof and the edges of the roof.
08:39 You can't have stuff dropping down onto the railway.
08:42 And to be honest, originally there were two over bridges that ran across here, between
08:49 independent bridges that ran across here.
08:51 We demolished those as part of the construction works and then built this new bridge deck
08:57 to bring a much better and wider entrance into the airport departures.
09:05 Come the 21st, this will all open, that temporary, this temporary scaffold here and all the supporting
09:17 peristalses will all be removed.
09:19 And try and imagine this now big, big open concourse right the way back from the top
09:24 of the escalators there, right the way through here and all the way around for people to
09:29 go straight in and to the two ticket lines that are the other side of this barrier, okay,
09:35 of that concourse.
09:36 We've got some important testing to do this coming weekend.
09:39 So we have two of the clauses that we have to meet for interoperability is to demonstrate
09:45 that the lux levels, the light levels from all of the lighting we've installed meets
09:50 the requirements throughout the whole of the new concourse stairs, escalators and feed
09:55 into the platforms.
09:56 And the second one is that the PAVA, which is basically your public address system, speech
10:02 intelligibility is consistent and uniform throughout the whole facility.
10:08 So this weekend we'll be clearing all of the equipment, plant materials off that site,
10:13 the temporary fencing, and we'll be undertaking that testing over the weekend.
10:19 Once we've got the evidence that we've met the required levels, that gets submitted as
10:22 part of our technical files to the Office of Rail Regulation.
10:29 That's the last two key pieces of evidence that we need to get through to get the ORR
10:34 to certificate to allow us to open it.
10:36 So that's really critical this weekend.
10:38 We are confident that we'll meet the requirements.
10:42 We've already done the testing once and we had a very, very small number of compliant
10:48 and non-compliant areas.
10:50 And since then we've put acoustic panelling up throughout that entire concourse area,
10:56 so we expect to get even better results once we do the final testing.
11:01 All of those temporary barriers, temporary scaffold and temporary routes will be removed
11:07 and then you'll have effectively one big open concourse either side of this bulkhead, feeding
11:12 in both ways into the airport.
11:14 More effective.
11:15 [Indistinct chatter]
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11:34 [Indistinct chatter]
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11:50 So we're at the London end of the platform at the moment.
11:54 If you could just stay behind the yellow line that would be great.
11:58 If you look back up to the canopy there, you can see what we call the ski slope roof and
12:05 the lift motor room for the lifts on 3 and 4.
12:10 And you know, effectively we've got platform soffit work and edging to do to finish off
12:17 between now, in fact most of the soffit work won't be completed here by the time we open.
12:24 We don't need to complete that at the point that we open because it's not, the absolute
12:29 requirement here is to have the lighting and the PAVA, the speakers working, customer information,
12:35 new screens there, up there, they'll be commissioned and ready for the 20th.
12:39 So that building there, there look, that's the back of house.
12:47 There's the control room in the corner.
12:50 So they actually for the first time have a view of the operational railway from the control room.
12:55 And for anybody that understands railway operations, it's really, really good for an operator to
13:01 be able to see what's going on in the outside world.
13:04 Where those ticket line is just there, behind that area there, used to be quite an extensive
13:11 set of building that housed all of the ticket office, cash office, GTR staff, their ops
13:24 control room.
13:25 That's where we cleared it all out, increased the barrier lines, made this station much,
13:33 much more accessible with a wider ticket barriers for every single ticket barrier coming through.
13:40 Provided a new special customer assistance point over there in the corner and just generally
13:47 opened up this.
13:49 From this end here right to the other end is a complete new bridge deck that has been
13:56 built from platform 7 across 5 and 6 and across 3 and 4 above an operational railway.
14:02 And unlike some traditional bridge decks on the railways where we tend to build bridge
14:08 decks off site, slide them in or drop them in, it had to be built steel section by steel
14:15 section by steel section and then effectively the metal deck on top of it and then the concrete
14:20 screed above.
14:30 Platform 5 for the 1532 Southern service to London Victoria.
14:36 We took the opportunity here to widen this platform, there was a very big wide way what
14:41 we call a big 6 foot across the tracks to slew that track over and create the width to
14:49 expand.
14:50 Second set of dual escalators going up into the new concourse.
14:55 So come the 20th, 21st this holding at the end here will be struck, in fact we're probably
15:00 going to remove that earlier which will then give you access.
15:05 So as you can imagine you've got a 12 car train going to the end of the platform here,
15:09 anybody coming off, front 4 coaches will filter naturally into here and into the lifts in
15:15 the middle section.
15:16 People in the middle section will obviously feed into the lifts or the escalators at either
15:21 end.
15:22 So you can see your kind of doubling capacity on each of these platforms when we open this
15:29 up and that should really clear the platforms a lot lot quicker.
15:33 The other doors for that lift and all of that concourse will be open.
15:38 So we brought this into operation earlier and this is kind of some of the staging work
15:42 we need to enable us to get flooring finished in certain areas, move holding about.
15:48 Logistically it's been really challenging and this is where Costains I have to say,
15:53 I've worked with Costains for 5 years at London Bridge and they're just fantastic at managing
15:58 that sort of stuff.
15:59 They really are an excellent contractor in delivering this type of work and making it
16:04 happen almost seamlessly.
16:06 On that side, if you've operated the call point downstairs, this is the side that will
16:11 open.
16:12 If you've got people coming in both directions, if they press both the call points, both doors
16:16 are open.
16:17 So it sometimes catches people out.
16:19 But that's the standard requirement for these lifts.
16:24 As you came up is what we've called the loading bay.
16:28 There's two mullions which are the steel sections and three parading panels that are missing
16:35 there and beyond that is a big scaffold loading bay.
16:39 All of these mutes and all of the materials go in and out of that loading bay.
16:44 We bring in a small rope crane and lift each one of these machines out.
16:51 That's going to happen probably about the middle of next week.
16:57 Wednesday we will start to clear the concourse and then pretty much from the Friday through
17:03 to the Monday, this will be then going through deep clean and we will be getting it ready.
17:13 All of the temporary protection that we've got around the goalpost pillars, all of the
17:18 temporary covers that we've got everywhere to protect whilst we're doing the construction
17:22 work, all of that will be removed.
17:25 We've got some additional manifestations to go on the lifts downstairs that says 'Lift'.
17:32 All of the final bits of cladding and signage that's not shown at the moment will be removed
17:38 and we'll then be in a position on the Monday, potentially with the Secretary of State coming
17:43 down to view the site before we open on Tuesday.